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Movies use the same formula to make us want to watch them. We know this. They know this. And yet we all pretend it’s not happening because it’s really fun to pay 15 bucks to turn your brain off for two hours. This video stitching together similar scenes in movie trailers shows how it’s undeniably…
Nobody wants to say it outright, but the Apple Watch sucks. So do most smartwatches. Every time I use my beautiful Moto 360, its lack of functionality makes me despair. But the problem isn’t our gadgets. It’s that the future of consumer tech isn’t going to come from information devices. It’s going to come from…
On the heels of rioting over police violence in Baltimore, the Justice Department announced today that the Obama administration will be giving local police departments $20 million in grants to buy body cameras for their officers. The $20 million is not a small amount of money—it’s also the first sum that Congress has approved funding…
An eReader lets travelers bring thousands of books with them on their journeys, but what if each of those stories was customized to wherever they happened to be at the moment? That’s the idea behind the Trip Book from a Brazilian loyalty program called Smiles that uses GPS to automatically change the location and landmarks…
Officially revealed back in September of last year, and teased even earlier at Toy Fair in New York, Diamond Select Toys’ perfect replica of the time-traveling DeLorean’s Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor seen in the Back to the Future trilogy is finally available for sale. If you haven’t been able to find a model 223A…
Tesla unveiled a new product line at its design studio in LA tonight. It’s called Tesla Energy and it’s a suite of batteries for homes and for businesses. The existence of the batteries has been one of the worst kept secretsof all time. But we are here at the announcement event and finally have some…
What if Tony Stark became Iron Man while he was still a toddler? Well, while we don’t have a Marvel Babies cartoon show to answer that question (somehow!), this new toy gives us a little glimpse at such a scenario. The cutest widdle billionare superhero there is! The latest figure in Beast Kingdom’s “Egg Attack…
Uber upgrades its unfortunately necessary SOS button, the Apple Watch isn’t really as much to make as you think, and Google voice actions get waaaay better. BitStream is all the news and rumors you missed yesterday. Google’s been updating a lot of its core services recently by adding the same feature—third-party apps. Earlier this week,…
First seen way back in October of last year, Lego’s version of the Flatiron building—one of New York’s most iconic landmarks next to the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building—is finally available for those looking for a souvenir of the city, or to add to their Lego Architecture collection. Given Lego recently opened…
On April 23rd 2005, the first ever video was uploaded to YouTube. Just a few days later in May, the video site opened to the public with its beta launch. That means YouTube turns 10 this month and it’s celebrating the only way it knows: with its favorite videos. That first ever video was Me…
The retoucher Elizabeth Moss has decided to give us a behind-the-scenes look at the world’s high-end photograph retouching. In a series of time-lapse videos, she boils down hours of laborious retouching into mere seconds, and the results are pretty crazy. Moss has worked with magazine like Vogue, Elle, GQ, and Vanity Fair and runs Rare…
This might look unlike most cockroaches you’ve ever seen—but that’s because it was probably quite a lot more aggressive than any you’ve seen, too. It had to be, because, it likely survived by hunting (admittedly quite small) prey, some 100 million years ago. Examined by researchers from the Geological Institute in Bratislava and the State…
Remember Grooveshark, that bootleggy version of Pandora that let you stream any song, in surprisingly high quality, for free? After nearly a decade of blatant copyright infringement, the site’s finally totally kaput. Top image: Gadgetdude / Flickr Here’s an excerpt of the epitaph that now lives on Grooveshark’s website, which hints at the very serious…
The 90-year-old tortoise Mrs. T has been unable to walk since rats viciously chewed off her front legs while she was hibernating. Now, her devoted owners have given her a second chance at mobility, by attaching wheels from a model aircraft set onto her shell. As her owner Jude Ryder told The Telegraph, there was…
The newest high-speed camera on the block won’t be making its way into Michael Bay’s hands anytime soon, but it will be making his ‘splosions look rather poky. See, this camera will be helping scientists watch atoms zoom around at 28,000 miles-per-second. Top image: Keiichi Nakagawa, University of Tokyo It’s called Sequentially Timed All-optical Mapping…
We tend to think of the ivory trade as an elusive black market of hardened criminals and shadowy elites, operating in the darkest recesses of the Internet. But as it turns out, there are plenty more ordinary ivory buyers and sellers, including just about anyone on Craigslist. Top image: Wikimedia As Motherboard reported this week,…
Elon Musk will take the stage at Tesla’s design studio tonight at 11:30 pm EDT to announce the company’s newest products: a highly anticipated battery for home use as well as a more mysterious “utility-scale” battery. And you can watch it all live here. We’ll post updates from the event, but until then, here’s the…
Why are our digital assistants submissive human women?It’s more than a little sexist, no? But soon, Microsoft’s Cortana will let you change her gender. There will be a male version too. At Microsoft’s Build 2015 developer conference, Cortana director of engineering Michael Calcagano told me that the team had decided to give users more personality…
You do not want to piss off the bombardier beetle. When disturbed, it sprays noxious, near-boiling liquid out of its abdomen—an effective though confounding ability. After all, how does the beetle pull off such a violent chemical reaction without, well, damaging its insides? A newly published study inScience sheds some light the bombardier beetle’s peculiar…
We’ve seen it demoed on stage. We used a janky (but amazing) prototype—but until today we’ve never actually seen Microsoft’s real holographic headset in person. Now, here it is: a weird, futuristic visor with four visible cameras, two speakers and what looks like six buttons. Let’s take a closer look at hardware behind Microsoft’s augmented,…
